Castlevania or Castleroids?

Everyone’s heard 1000 retrospectives explaining how Symphony of the Night revolutionized the Castlevania series, or read glowing reviews of it’s hand-held successors…the vast non-linear structure, the thousands of hidden items, the “depth” of the RPG leveling system, etc, etc. I’m not going to bother arguing with Symphony of the Night’s quality, however, I am going to argue that certain good elements of the series’ gameplay were discarded and lost when the Castlevania series turned into Gothic Metroid.

Like Final Fantasy VII to Square RPG’s, Symphony of the Night was a game that turned a lot of people on to the Castlevania series that had previously been unfamiliar with it. Thus, I would imagine that some don’t really know what the series was like prior to the PS1 console generation, or what was good about it.

Well, contrary to it’s late brethren, the early CV titles were linear in nature; you traveled from the beginning of the level (usually on the left) side-scrolling to the end (usually on the right) platforming and killing enemies with your whip. The series did flirt with a few non-linear elements; for example, in Castlevania III you sometimes were given a choice of 2 different levels to complete on your way to the end of the game…but, for the most part it was just a matter of jumping and whipping your way from level 1 to level 8.

This seems simplistic compared to the later Symphony-style structure right? You don’t explore looking for hidden treasure, you don’t gain new abilities as you go, and you don’t backtrack into old areas to find hidden passageways…so what’s to miss about the old CV games?

I will submit that the first thing lost with the SOTN or “Castleroid” or “Metroidvania” game structure…is difficulty. The early CV games may not have been quite as grueling as Contra, but they were definitely games where your performance counted.

Rather than a bottomless pit of HP that expands as you level up, you were given a single health bar. If you didn’t make a point to avoid taking unnecessary hits, you would get owned by a stray skeleton bone…and if you didn’t know how to take out a jumping “fleaman” quickly, your health bar would be torn to shreds in seconds. Bottomless pits were also commonplace in early CV games; whereas falling to your death in the Castleroids is impossible, as you will just fall to a different area of the castle.

Thus, making your way through early Castlevania games required considerable technical skill. The Belmonts were a slow moving bunch, so precise timing was required to make every jump. Enemies were always trying to get in your way as you jumped, and could knock you off of a precarious perch to your death. Making your way from platform to platform required taking on enemies with specific techniques and planning your kills and jumps in a specific order attacking with specific weapons. A skeleton could block your advance from above by tossing bones in your path…you couldn’t reach with your whip, so the only choice was to toss your axe in mid-air making sure the arc crossed with the enemy’s position. Having the wrong weapon could be a major pain getting through certain areas, and you could die in the same spot over and over again trying to get the timing for your jump or throw right.

By comparison, on the technical side the new Castlevanias are a walk in the park. The more you level up, the less you have to worry about bottoming out your HP. One can go hours without dieing as long as they remember to stop at each save point to replenish their health….the only major snafu’s happen when accidentally running headlong into an certain enemy or boss who’s level is too high above yours. Even then, winning is not a trial of perfecting the right technique, but merely leaving and coming back when your stats have risen through virtue of sheer time put into the game.

In my opinion, the RPG stat system of the Castleroids is pointless. Sure, it may give you a sense of achievement to see your numbers climb like you’re actually getting stronger, but it’s just HP inflation. All it really serves to do, whether in actual RPG’s, or in Castlevania, is to make success in the game about pointless repetition and redundant level grinding rather than actual strategy or skill. To me, that just likens the game to mental masturbation or “brain crack”.

The next thing I will posit as a shortcoming in the Castleroid game structure is the lack of variety in environments. The old Castlevanias may have been linear in structure, but they still had a high sense of exploration and adventure due to the variety in environments. In many of the old Castlevanias, even if you were technically supposed to be within the walls of Dracula’s property, you were not stuck inside a single castle the entire time. In other cases, the game was a quest across Transylvania to the castle. Almost every game began with a castle hall, but soon you were let out into the open, exploring ruins, forests, caves, villages, graveyards, haunted ships, and the like.

To it’s credit, Symphony of the Night and some of it’s hand-held imitators did do a good job of varying the environment given what they had to work with. Somehow they managed to cram things like mines, lagoons, and caverns into the confines of Dracula’s castle regardless of the plausibility of these places being there. However, these locations were still limited compared to the locals explored in SOTN’s linear predecessors.

By the time you’ve played through Symphony and some of it’s hand-held imitators, you start to feel like you’re always crammed in the same rectangular hallways following a similar map structure in every game, and the different themes applied to each different area show through as merely a new paint job to the same old corridors. This is actually most apparent in the PS2 3D sequel Lament of Innocence, where each of the areas are literally made up of the same rectangular hallways and rooms with different wall textures applied.

Of course, you can partly blame the inconsistent quality of the various sequels for this, but the truth is, as long as the entire game is limited to the same location, introducing variety in the environments is going to get increasingly difficult.

I’m not trying to argue that Symphony of the Night and all of it’s successors are terrible games. Symphony of the Night is a great game in it’s own right, and some of the sequels are pretty good. However, they still fail to reproduce much of what made the original Castlanias fun, and the more the Castleroid format is repeated, the more it seems to stale; even people who have addictively played through all the GBA and DS titles have to admit that they are largely rather uninspired rehashes of SOTN. Let’s face it, rehashing something till it’s stale with little or no evolution over the years will kill anything, regardless of how good it is to begin with.

The simple answer is that the Castlevania games need to start trying new things. Fortunately, the recent DS title Portrait of Ruin attempted just that; integrating the Castleroid non-linear format with the old CV’s open environments and varied locales. Unfortunately, the game seems to have been released half-assed, and the poorly designed enemy encounters, persistent stat-leveling system, and heavy use of copy-and-paste level design caused it to be a mediocre experience for many reviewers. Some devout Castleroid fans may get the impression that the old elements which POR attempted to resurrect were merely obsolete and that’s what killed the game, when it was actually just poor execution.

Fortunately, the upcoming Dracula X Chronicles for PSP offers both the original, and a 3D remake of Dracula X: Rondo of Blood. Rondo was the direct predecessor to Symphony of the Night, made by the same team with the same visual style, albeit with the old linear game structure. Despite it’s origin in Japan 4 years before Symphony of the Night, it hasn’t come stateside till now.

With any luck, the PSP release of Rondo of Blood will show mainstream gamers that Castlevania’s don’t have to be made in the imitation-Metroid style to be quality and fun. Perhaps if Dracula X Chronicles is successful, Konami will consider using more of the series’ original elements in future Castlevania games, and rethink it’s late approach of simply rehashing Symphony of the Night ad-nauseam. To hope for a quality 3D Castlevania might be unrealistic, but at the very least, we could see a kick-ass 2D non-Castleroid CV game in the distant future.

For a detailed history of the Castlevania series, I recommend a visit to The Castlevania Dungeon.

~ by Julian Gnam on April 11, 2007.